Because the thrill of reaching that pinnacle is greatly reduced knowing that anyone who can push a que button is seeing the exact same thing. An extra couple stats on heroic gear doesn't do it for me.

Then i am afraid i have to tell you that you dont play to reach the pinnacle of what the game has to offer like you think you do. You play to feel superior to other people and to show your e-peen, disregarding if you reach the pinnacle of what the game has to offer or not.

My new alts would like a word with you. I have 3 new 90s that went into their first MSV lfr to get geared all with 20 elder charms each. Out of all 6 boses x2 (with coins) I got zero pieces of gear on all 3 of the toons. Unlucky aren't I?

Sure. Just don't think your doing the game any favors by asking it to cater to you. For perspective, in the 4 years WoW had a hardcore raiding model, it gained about 230,000 subscriptions per month and never had a losing quarter. Since the day it started catering to you, it has lost 3 million players and has had only one winning quarter in the last 2.5 years.

The same hardcore raiders have grown up, got jobs, married, and had kids. So unless you pretend that the players in WoW live in some kind of bubble your analysis is so far off it may as well be on Mars

Do you ever just discuss/debate issues without backhandedly insulting people and their opinions?

On Topic: Gearing through LFR is simply another option. People clamored for choices when 5.0 dropped, and now LFR is listed among the options. Is it the best or fastest option to gear up? Likely no. Should people get belittled for using it as a viable resource if they are not complaining about it? I don't think so. The vocal minority of the forums does not speak for the silent majority who continues to play the game as it is without complaint or comment and likely never setting foot in a forum.

I'm not here to pander to people and kiss their feet. If I disagree I'm not going to hold back. Sorry if people can't handle that. This is a discussion forum which means discussion happens along with disagreement and sorry hate to break it to you but some opinions can't peacefully coexist with others if they are complete opposites. Have I ever said people can't have their opinion? People can believe what they want and say what they want but in turn that means others get to believe what they want and say what they want in response.

What do you think Activision cares about more, having everyone see raid content or having an extra $15 a month from 3 million people?

Ironically, if EVERYONE has a chance to see all the content, they make that money plus some. The easier the game, the more people it grabs. The more it grabs, the more that play. Let's face it. It is a 9 year old game, on a VERY old game engine which still has more than 8M subscriptions. This means there are about 200K hardcore raiders from the approximately 8M (very conservative estimate). If we dumped that whole 3% of the player base, they would still be OVER 7M subs and still making money after almost a decade. Your "nostalgia" for the Hardcore raider has you fooled into thinking that you are either the majority of their income, or that any of you still even matter. Let's face it, if they stopped cranking out 25M heroics, they could focus on all of the other casual friendly items that players ask for like:

I think the casual base has you nervous. But you should probably not try to take away our raids, cause we have this way of getting Blizz to give in to our impulses and give us what we want. Like:

Mounts at 20 and Flight at 60
No more gathering tools (skinning knife, pick axe, fishing pole)
No more wood to make fires
No more ammo
No more dead zone for hunters
LFD / CRZ
and a hundred other things that made the game OVERLY simple like BoAs, RaF, SoR, Guild Perks... and more. It's no threat that we could ruin 25M heroic content if we wanted to... it's a guarantee. Best to just back off and let us keep our watered down raiding system.

Oh no I didn't miss it. I've closely watched the casual experiment fail as quarter after quarter brings in more losses.

Non-LFR raiding is now and has always been a niche. You can believe that Blizzard catering to that group was what raised subscriptions during BC if you like. It's non-intuitive, overly simple and flies in the face of other phenomena such as game age, a changing game culture, the rise of many other MMO's many of them F2P etc. Not to mention there have never been enough raiders in the game to explain much of anything at all regarding mass subscriber movement. The point is ALL of these things have an effect and the reason the game isn't growing at the moment is largely because it has been difficult to attract brand new customers to an eight-year-old game that costs $100+ dollars a year to subscribe to in the US/EU as well as additional costs for expansions, etc. This also leaves out the most significant barrier to new customers which is the normal non-sale cost to start from the beginning.

The 'casual experiment' has been on since 2005 in fact since WoW was a casual alternative to EQ to start with. If non-casual MMO's were thought to be highly profitable and competitive, I'm guessing that we would be seeing one out there somewhere doing big business. The fact that there isn't really any competition of this nature in the US/EU markets should tell you something.

Believe what you like. There are actual observable facts regarding those companies that wish to compete in this market that don't line up with your beliefs.

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Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap. When posting try and be in the 10% once in a while. It makes it better for everyone.

I'm not here to pander to people and kiss their feet. If I disagree I'm not going to hold back. Sorry if people can't handle that. This is a discussion forum which means discussion happens along with disagreement and sorry hate to break it to you but some opinions can't peacefully coexist with others if they are complete opposites. Have I ever said people can't have their opinion? People can believe what they want and say what they want but in turn that means others get to believe what they want and say what they want in response.

Not looking for you to pander to someone. But you can disagree without being a jerk and backhandedly calling people names. Make your point, stand your ground, but maybe go a little easy with the insults. Someone insults you, then by all means fire back. But most of your posts involve you calling someone a retard, or berating/belittling them for having an opinion, and so on. You don't have to be smilin' Bob, but it would be nice if you didn't just rip every poster a new one in your Wall of Response.

The honor acquired in this conversion counts toward the "honor earned this season" when qualifying for purchase of honor weapons, btw.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

This new system Blizzard is implementing is the worst designed system ever, and goes back to the era where RNG could ruined you completely for months.

A weekly lockout system with RNG involved can NEVER be an effective catch up mechanism, and a system that depends on it is so poorly designed that its a shame that a company as big as Blizzard makes this mistake.

Anyone that thinks about it for a minimum of time realizes that any system with a weekly lockout and RNG WILL starve a lot of people trying to catch up for MONTHS, because thats the nature of RNG, it will not be "gentle" with a lot of people that wont receive gear and the weekly lockout WILL extend that for a period of months.

Blizzard is making huge mistakes in this expansion, and they will suffer more sub drops than in the previous one becayse of that. The first quarter they already lost the same amount than in Cataclysm, which was the biggest failure in WoW history.

And this whole argument falls apart because we can get unlimited elder charms now. Yes RNG sucks but elder charms help with that and don't pretend they don't. This is in addition to all the other ways of not only getting gear in 5.2 but in getting rep as well. We need to stop pretending LFR is it for gearing up because it isn't. I keep hearing people say they hate dailies and dungeons and LFR and farming rares and this and that all to justify crying that they can't get a raid ready character hours within hitting lvl cap. I'm sorry but it is just getting really stupid now. Blizzard is literally handing us gear and people are crying about it because it isn't in a tailor made format for each and every special snowflake who plays this game.

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 05:50 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Pretty sure this is close to 100% wrong. The vast majority of players don't do progression raiding, and that has always been true.

No offense but given your very clear bias against raiding and raiders in general I don't think much of what you say in regard to it has much merit. You take any and every opportunity to take pot shots at the raiding community some of which is deserved but you have taken it to a whole new level not seen since Wrath. Progression raiding doesn't only mean running heroic modes. Progression is exactly just that: progression. In fact I pointed this out to you earlier when you cried about the poor casuals being left behind in tier 15 because they aren't geared for ToT. The problem is tier 14 content and gear is still relevant and for some reason you can't seem to comprehend this. I have a lot of friends quite happily still running tier 14 content because it is fun for them and because they are getting upgrades from that content in addition to upgrades from 5.2 content. Maybe you should get out of LFR and actually try out some normal modes or even better actually talk to people doing normal modes rather than passing judgment on them for being "hardcore" when by and large most of them have never claimed any such thing.

If Blizzard wants, they could today make it so you just login, push a big shiny button in the middle of your city, and instantly get every achievement, pet, mount, gear, title, rank, FoS etc that ever existed.

The problem is the alternative, when taken to similarly ridiculous extremes would be a game where you have to log in and click a button 5,000 times every day for three weeks to get something.

It also doesn't sound fun. You know why? It's because in both cases it ignores the elements of the game most people (who don't play the game for some sense of self-esteem) enjoy most. Adapting to changing situations, class changes, new strategies, etc... Reacting to mechanics or abilities used by the enemy. Learning to coordinate with friends to beat more challenging content. Just hanging out with other people online. Exploring a new area. The list goes on.

None of those things require character progression to consist primarily of grinding the same content you have done 100 times before. In fact, grinding the same stuff as the only means to see the next step tends to get in the way of most of those.

Ultimately, my ideal game rewards skill over play time. If you can get a boss down you get the rewards that make me capable of my next challenge (not a 5% chance but a 100% chance). However, an MMO will always have those players that play enough to burn through all content if it's all "one and done". I understand that, and have no problem with progression being grindy at the "top tier" for all play types. Why there? Because everyone not at the top tier always has the "next step" available until they get to the grind anyway (I.E. they're not going to outpace the content any more than anyone else).

Honestly, I agree that progression should be preserved better than it is now. Farming heroic dungeons with a bunch of people in raid gear 2 tiers into an expansion is about as boring and repetitive as it gets, but also doesn't challenge players. I'd rather see vendors put in for old tiers where you have access to buy (for fairly cheap, perhaps justice points as those seem to have little purpose for your average player) gear from boss X once you've downed boss X once.

Then the old content sees more activity, that activity isn't cheapened by everyone in there being massively overgeared for the content, catching up is as simple as downing each "old" boss once or twice, late-comers get to experience the content closer to intended (instead of with a bunch of groups bombing through for achievements), and alts can be brought up by a guild to fill a needed role very quickly.

And yet gearing up through LFR and dailies and crafting and numerous other means of obtaining raid gear is allowing casuals more access than ever to normal/heroic mode raiding.

I'm not sure that having the ability to do it just to do it or feeling the need to be the first to do it and post on World of Logs can really be considered the same thing. Maybe the casual wants to gear up to be an alt spot for his guild. Or, maybe he just wants better gear for LFR. Until someone pays my $15, I will play the game Blizz has given me and not the rose-colored raider's version.

No offense but given your very clear bias against raiding and raiders in general I don't think much of what you say in regard to it has much merit. You take any and every opportunity to take pot shots at the raiding community some of which is deserved but you have taken it to a whole new level not seen since Wrath. Progression raiding doesn't only mean running heroic modes. Progression is exactly just that: progression.

Even normal mode raiders always were (and are) a minority. And their number is falling down but that's another story.

No offense but given your very clear bias against raiding and raiders in general I don't think much of what you say in regard to it has much merit. You take any and every opportunity to take pot shots at the raiding community some of which is deserved but you have taken it to a whole new level not seen since Wrath.

Just a few points:

(1) The mere presence of raid content beyond what I want to do degrades the game experience for me. Sorry if you don't like that, but it's the truth. This is the mirror image of the hardcores not liking the presence of LFR.

(2) Some elite players act as if the game should cater to them merely because they are skilled. This is nonsense. There is no reason why being more skilled means the game should be tuned for you. It's possible to be too skilled to be a good target audience.

(3) The abrasive nature of some of the more elite players rubs me the wrong way. Simply seeing players like that deprived of pleasure would be a (mild) positive for me. Schadenfreude is a nasty emotion, but deeply satisfying.

(4) Of course "I want" and "Blizzard should" are not at all the same thing. Blizzard doesn't need to make me maxmimally happy; they're ok with just making as many players as possible just happy enough to keep playing. The current arrangement is doing that in my case, even if I gripe about parts of it.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

I certainly didn't. I knew they were tuning up normal mode in T14, so, knowing what was coming, I decided to not bother trying to find a raiding guild. It was LFR or nothing, and so far LFR has been enough to keep me playing.

The trajectory of raid participation and progression in this expansion has been consistent with what I thought would happen. I project further decline, even if Blizzard panics and starts nerfing (I doubt they will, btw).

What I am most interested in is WHY Blizzard chose this path. I'm wondering if it isn't substantially their attempt at a definitive experiment, to see how many players really want harder content.

Yep. Figured as much. Instead of educating yourself a little you are taking the position that Blizzard is taking a hard line with raids and not even verifying that is what is happening. Jesus christ. Could you possibly be any more biased? How about this? Instead of telling us what normal mode raids are going to do to the game and its population why don't you try doing the content yourself? I said it on the official forums and I will say it here your ignorance is showing.

---------- Post added 2013-03-19 at 06:13 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Crashdummy

The low participation has more to do with the high difficulty of normal raiding. Over 40k guilds started MSV normal, only 13k finished HOF normal, and thats after item upgrades "nerfing" the content.

No effective catch up mechanism coupled with a continuation of hard normal raiding in ToT will lower that number.

People are trying, and they are failing because content is too hard for them.

Want to know why I stopped raiding tier 14? It wasn't difficulty it was the fact that my guild blew up shortly after Mop launched and then some of us moved to another guild and then our raid leader quit the game (he does this with all games so don't even try to make this about Mop). Then there was the fact most of Horde on Proudmoore had faction changed during Cata so there weren't many options for raid guilds. In short, difficulty isn't the only reason why people are having trouble with content. If anything I think for a lot of people the issue is logistics more than anything else. People always talk about the low pop realms but no one seems to care about the realms where faction balance swings wildly back and forth which affects progression as well.

My new alts would like a word with you. I have 3 new 90s that went into their first MSV lfr to get geared all with 20 elder charms each. Out of all 6 boses x2 (with coins) I got zero pieces of gear on all 3 of the toons. Unlucky aren't I?

I will add mine, though as mentioned a while back it is most likely a statistical outlier.

I have never gotten anything with an elder charm that wasn't a duplicate of an item I already have or a bag of bullshit. My brother has done LFR for about a month leading up to and after the patches and got the same piece of gear three times.

Want to know why I stopped raiding tier 14? It wasn't difficulty it was the fact that my guild blew up shortly after Mop launched and then some of us moved to another guild and then our raid leader quit the game (he does this with all games so don't even try to make this about Mop). Then there was the fact most of Horde on Proudmoore had faction changed during Cata so there weren't many options for raid guilds. In short, difficulty isn't the only reason why people are having trouble with content.

Difficulty is an underlying contributing cause for your problems. Not an exclusive cause, but its corrosive effects are being felt everywhere.

Difficult content sends the message to most players that they aren't as good as they were telling themselves they were. And you think people LIKE this, to have their noses rubbed in their suckage? They don't, and you can see the hollowing out it's causing everywhere.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.